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Artifacts

This Saturday, Esperanza celebrates 10 years in its home on San Pedro Avenue with a benefit performance and dance featuring Sandra Cisneros and her well-received 2002 novel Caramelo. Director Graciela Sanchez notes that while Cisneros has performed dramatized excerpts from the book for fundraisers for Jump-Start and the San Antonio Library, "she knows that each presentation has to be different." Esperanza's event, which also reprises Cisneros' critical role in raising funds to purchase the current building a decade ago, will be augmented with live music by George Prado and his band. For tickets and information, call 228-0201.

Curatorial shift?

In response to rumors that MaLin Wilson-Powell, Curator of Art After 1945 at the McNay, is leaving San Antonio and her post, Public & Media Relations Manager Margaret Anne Lara says only that, "She'll still be the curator." An official statement was due to be released after press time for this issue. Wilson-Powell could not be reached for comment.

Confirmed move.

Blue Star board president Marc Wiegand has left Bracewell & Patterson, the firm where he has practiced business law for 25 years, to join the San Antonio office of Holland & McKnight. Holland & McKnight is the fourth largest law firm in the U.S., and their strong presence south of the border fits Wiegand's experience in Latin American-oriented litigation. Wiegand, who was central to the effort to initiate and bring Blue Star's Mexican Report to town (opening this May), says that the move will not adversely impact his arts involvement. "It will probably enhance it," he says, adding that he is very excited about the move.

Moved to tears.

"When a painting is not a game, when it no longer matters who knows more about the painter, then painting can be an art that might actually deserve the high value we put on it," writes James Elkins, professor of Art History at the Art Institute of Chicago, in Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, out in paperback from Routledge. Elkins hopes to rescue our relationship with art from the realm of art theory. His digressions on the variety and impenetrability of the meaning of tears are not riveting, but his reflections on the importance of being moved by art are a welcome addition to the discussion of what art's role in society is and ought to be. For more info, visit www.routledge-ny.com/.

CAM update.

Contemporary Art Month's new website is up and running at www.camsanantonio.org. The once-again-independent festival `see "We don't need to stinkin' badges," March 11-17, 2004` also has a fiscal sponsor in the form of Colleen and Tom Frost's ASKEW, which means CAM can accept tax deductible donations. "We're happy to help out because we heard enough artists say they want Contemporary Art Month to stay in July," says Colleen. "We just really think it's the right thing to do." To register for CAM, make a contribution, or just get more info, call 212-7082. •